Retracting our county school board selection
We erred. As a result, we must retract last month's endorsement of Eric Dillie for the Alameda County Board of Education.
Instead, we tepidly recommend Cheryl Cook-Kallio, a retired teacher who served on the Pleasanton City Council from 2006-14 for the Area 7 seat representing the Livermore Valley.
In vetting Dillie, we missed our own story about his no-contest plea to a 2016 misdemeanor charge of failing to report suspected child abuse. State law requires school personnel to immediately notify police or child protective services when they know or suspect a student has been abused.
The case stems from an incident involving a foreign exchange student at Livermore Valley Charter Preparatory School, where Dillie was principal. According to a police court declaration, a tutor humiliated the 14-year-old student in front of others during an after-school program, prompting the student to leave the campus.
The student was found behind a local grocery store, where the tutor grabbed him by his arms, picked him up and shoved him into a car headfirst before driving him back to the school. The student sustained a laceration to his shin and complained of pain to his knees.
The next morning, the tutor informed the vice principal of the incident. The vice principal notified Dillie. But neither contacted the student to check on his condition nor notified authorities.
According to the police declaration, Dillie and the vice principal joked about the abuse incident, discussed it with others and minimized what occurred. Dillie also provided different, inconsistent statements to investigators.
Dillie continues to minimize what occurred. In retelling the story to us in a follow-up interview, he made no mention of the student's injuries. He noted that he later withdrew his no-contest plea and the prosecutor dismissed the case.
But that was after Dillie completed 30 hours of courtordered volunteer work and training on mandatory reporting of child abuse. The dismissal was part of a process that allows first-time offenders who have completed court-ordered conditions to wipe criminal convictions from their records. It is not an exoneration of a defendant's original behavior.
None of that changes our misgivings about his two opponents.
During our interview, CookKallio incorrectly saw the responsibility of a county school board trustee to include oversight of local school district finances, which is strictly the purview of the elected county superintendent of schools. But she has political experience and, of the two opponents, is mounting the more serious campaign.
The other candidate, Kate Dao, the founder and head of a small Livermore private school, seemed fuzzy about why she was running and unclear about some responsibilities of the job.
As for Dillie, while he has paid his dues, the issue for us is whether he deserves a seat on the county Board of Education. His handling of this incident tells us he does not.